Inkscape: How can I prevent background to shine through path?

Question

I have a background layer (gray in the example) and on top of that a foreground layer with black line art. I converted the line art to a path (using Path -> Trace Bitmap).

How do I prevent the background from shining through, like in the example? Clearly you should not see the fence through the person.

I made an new layer, manually traced the outline of the foreground (person), and put that shape in the "shine through protection" layer. That kind of works, until I change / move / resize the foreground picture. So I am wondering if there is an easier / better way of doing this.

I cannot just select a white fill because the traced path is on the drawn lines, not the area included by these lines. The picture below shows a red fill and black stroke for the foot:

So maybe I am doing the tracing wrong.

Answer 1

For this type of workflow, I find the easiest solution is to just manually draw masking shapes (in this case, solid white) and place them under the foreground art, then group.

Answer 2

Depending on what you're going to be doing with your Inkscape artwork version you might want to consider avoiding auto trace.

If you intend tweaking your lines at all then you'll be frustrated at the number of nodes involved. Instead, if you quickly redraw lines with "proper" lines you'll naturally place the nodes where required and additional tweaking is much more productive.

I haven't got Inkscape to hand but I think the paint bucket tool will do a decent job of creating vector shapes from bitmap sources. If Inkscape supported tracing centrelines you'd also gain more options.

Even with your outline traced path it's worth duplicating and path combining (union?) which, when dropped below the trace can be used as your new vector ground.